The windows of the upper floors were still burning with reflections. Without stirring from their rooms women could watch the sunset.
And the boy wanted to raise himself up faster, as though up there, on the cornice of the hill, were all the joy, all the games, all the adventures of the future. The very noise of Paris passed into his body, though he was not aware of listening to it. Up with you, nimble hoop ! Trains whistled in the suburbs in the plain. The child of the low streets recognised their cries without noticing them, as though he had been born among sea-birds. Roofs innumerable creaked in the -wind ; their creakings and cracklings sounded above the rustle of the leaves in the precipitous gardens. Like all these noises, the hoop, too, bounded and mounted. The child of Paris, as he stopped to take breath, drank in a sound of destinies that came to him, from everywhere.